I had long hesitated to return for a visit to Poland, though it is the land of my birth and that of my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. In fact, my Polish-Jewish lineage probably extends as far back as the 16th or 17th century, before the acquisition by Poland’s Jews of family names. Naturally my information about this earlier period is very sketchy. What I do know for sure is that both my mother’s and my father’s families were neither wealthy nor destitute. They owned small stores and village mills and ran pubs for Polish landowners; my father had a modest lumberyard. Nor did either branch of my family produce any illustrious rabbis. Ordinary devout Jews, they were faithful followers of the Galician hasidic rebbe of Belz.
I left Poland at the age of sixteen, in 1946, a year after the end of the war (but before the Communists had taken over), and only several weeks after the July 4 pogrom in Kielce in which 42 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust were murdered. As time went on, my Polish remained fluent, and I became a teacher of Slavic literatures. I thus had good professional grounds for a return visit, but never made one, partly because of specifically Jewish qualms, and partly for political reasons. For decades I had been periodically attacked in the Soviet press (and occasionally also in Eastern Europe) as a “reactionary warmonger” whose “pseudo-scholarly” writings—to say nothing of broadcasts over the Voice of America and Radio Liberty—were a “quasi-academic dimension of nefarious activities of the CIA and the Pentagon.” I even had an unofficial “biographer” in Moscow who systematically recorded my evil activities.
And then, forty-four years after my departure from postwar Cracow, came an invitation from the University of Lodz. Poland was no longer a “People’s Republic”; an ambassador from Israel had just presented his credentials to the non-Communist government in Warsaw; also, I had just turned sixty. If I was ever to see Poland again, this was clearly the time.
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Sunday, May 27, 1990
Lodz, Poland’s second largest city, with a population exceeding a million, does not even appear on standard tourist itineraries. Built largely in the 19th century, it boasts no famous historical landmarks and is not very attractive in appearance. Prior to World War I, it was imperial Russia’s Manchester, and textiles manufactured in Lodz were sold even in Central Asia.
Before World War II, Lodz had a very large Jewish population, about a quarter of a million, one-third of the city’s total, much of it destitute and Yiddish-speaking. But the Jewish community also had its textile tycoons as well as an assimilated Polish-speaking intelligentsia whose best-known representative was Julian Tuwim, one of modern Poland’s great poets. Irreverent, satirical, and “unpatriotic,” Tuwim bears some resemblance to Heinrich Heine. The refusal in Germany even today to acknowledge Heine as a truly German poet has its counterpart in the ambivalence with which Tuwim’s legacy is treated in Poland. Still, in Lodz I come upon a modest monument to the city’s arguably most famous native son (and, some days later, in a Cracow theater, I will be seeing an excellent cabaret-style performance of Tuwim’s verse).
Everywhere in the world, except in Israel, Sunday is the best day to visit a Jewish cemetery. There is one in Lodz, and, as a sign informs, thanks to the generosity of the Nussenbaum Family Foundation in Western Europe, the cemetery’s upkeep is reasonably satisfactory, although the monument to the city’s martyred Jews has obviously been vandalized. I meet three people at the cemetery, an elderly Yiddish-speaking man in an old military cap (visitors are requested to cover their heads) and a young couple who speak only Polish. The young man wears a large homemade yarmulke. There are now some 200 Jews in Lodz, he tells me, most of them retirees, with fewer than a dozen young people. Services are held in the synagogue on High Holy Days, and sometimes on other occasions—such as when foreigners visit.
I pass some recent graves and a number of tombstones erected after the war to commemorate victims of the Holocaust. Among older graves a large mausoleum now undergoing repair serves as the resting place of the family of the textile magnate Poznanski. Among the Hebrew and Polish inscriptions, I notice one in the Cyrillic script. It is the grave of Roza Deweltow, born in Vilna in 1919, killed in action in 1944 at age twenty-five. The Russian inscription reveals that she was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor.
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Monday, May 28
Food is abundant in Lodz, if costly to a Polish wage earner, and there are about a dozen daily newspapers. I opt for Solidarity’s Gazeta Wyborcza, which is edited by Adam Michnik, one of the union’s intellectuals who spent years in Communist Polish jails. The son of a steadfast Communist, Michnik is currently one of only two “persons of Jewish origin” (a favorite Polish locution perceived, for some reason, as a euphemism) active in political life. (The other is Bronislaw Geremek, a historian and a convert to Catholicism, now chairman of the Civil Parliamentarian Group in the Polish Senate.) Some people half-jokingly suggest that I read the venerable Communist-party daily Trybuna Ludu instead of Gazeta Wyborcza because opposition newspapers are more trustworthy than those sponsored by the establishment.
A friend’s contacts enable us to visit a monastery. The monks there are overwhelmingly young, many well-educated. Indeed, throughout my visit I will be struck by how young the priests, monks, and nuns are in the country, as well as by the large number of Roman Catholic churches under construction, by the throngs of people attending services even on weekdays, and by groups of boys and girls singing hymns at roadside chapels. Some of this is strictly religious, but clearly the Church is also still perceived as the repository of the national spirit, its traditional function in occupied Poland. Time will tell whether this extraordinary attachment will continue now that Poland is truly independent again after a hiatus of half a century.
The new liberal spirit in Poland also appears to have given encouragement to religious minorities. Within several days I am to see Byelorussian Orthodox churches (and also an Orthodox convent—with young nuns) in the vicinity of Bialystok in Eastern Poland near the Soviet frontier. And a chambermaid in Lodz confides in me that she is a Jehovah’s Witness. Until recently, she says, her co-religionists were reviled in the press as American agents who were receiving money and copies of Watchtower from Brooklyn. But things, she adds, are much better now.
Some 4,000 Jews remain in Poland, almost exactly one-tenth of 1 percent of the country’s prewar Jewish population, but they continue to figure prominently in the nation’s consciousness. In an agricultural school near Zdunska Wola, about a three-hour drive from Lodz, I see wooden dolls of bearded Jews in hasidic garb. The dolls have been made by local children who, needless to say, have never laid eyes on a Jew. I am to see similar dolls in Warsaw where they are manufactured, it seems, for Polish customers as well as for the tourist trade, as are metal Stars of David, and paintings of the tablets of the Ten Commandments.
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Tuesday, May 29
In keeping with traditional Polish hospitality, the lunch in a schoolteacher’s home is plentiful, rather fancy, and obviously far too expensive for a hostess whose husband, an engineer, works only part-time and is in danger of being laid off altogether.
Inflation, together with job insecurity, is viewed by some as a sinister plot on the part of the Communists to bring down the current government and seize power once again. Actually, the reasons are much simpler. Grotesquely obsolete machinery (some of the looms in Lodz’s textiles factories are said to be close to a hundred years old) and the near-total destruction of the work ethic during the decades of Communist rule have resulted in industrial products that are simultaneously low in quality and high in price. While Poland was a People’s Republic, these shoddy goods were bartered for raw materials from the USSR and the other Soviet satellites. Now, however, they cannot compete on the world market with the cheaper and better-quality output of South Korea or Hong Kong. Analogous problems bedevil the country’s agriculture, although it must be emphasized that the situation is far better here than in the Soviet Union. Poland’s peasants were never collectivized and are willing to work hard.
Both industry and agriculture desperately need foreign investment in order to modernize. Yet investors cannot easily be attracted to a country that already owes close to $40 billion, roughly $1,000 per capita, children included. Things are grim, everybody agrees, but in the meantime how about another shot of vodka?
This is my last evening in Lodz, and one of my hosts presents me with two books as a farewell gift. One is Jerzy Ficowski’s Polish translation of Itzhak Katzenelson’s epic Yiddish poem, The Song of the Murdered Jewish People (the translator’s dedication reads, “To our brothers, Polish Jews, on the 40th anniversary of their battle in the Warsaw Ghetto”). The other is Maria Brzezina’s Polszczyzna Zydow, a massive linguistic study of the dialect that was once spoken by the country’s unassimilated Jews—for an American counterpart, think of a scholarly investigation into the idiosyncrasies of Black English. In bookstores, incidentally, one finds quite a few items of Judaica, for the most part Polish translations of recent Western academic works in philosophy and history, but also such curiosities as a West German book on the cuisine of Poland’s Jews and a recording of Hebrew and Yiddish songs.
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Wednesday, May 30
Today is the Jewish holiday of Shavuot. Instead of attending services, I am in Auschwitz.
Now that the bitter clash between the Jews and Cardinal Glemp, the Polish Catholic Primate, over the location of a convent appears to have been resolved, all is quiet in Auschwitz. There are busloads of tourists from Western Europe, and in company with a large group of Polish schoolchildren I watch a Soviet documentary (with a Polish soundtrack) of the concentration camp on the day of liberation. Although Jews from all over Europe, and first and foremost from Poland proper, constituted a large majority of the camp’s inmates, only one of the scores of barracks specifically commemo-rates their martyrdom and resistance. A continuous recording of the memorial prayer, El male rahamim, resounds in this barrack, a few Israel-made memorial candles flicker on the floor.
Cracow is only an hour or so by car. Outwardly, the city has not changed much since my departure in 1946, only the traffic is much heavier and the buildings look dirty because of the smoke belching from the chimneys of neighboring Nowa Huta. I am on my way to meet a distant cousin I have not seen in forty-four years, the last relative still in Poland. He is eighty now, retired from his job as a bookkeeper. Together with his son, an unemployed engineer, my cousin takes me on a guided tour of the remnants of Jewish Cracow. Several buildings are still recognizable as old synagogues. There is also a still functioning synagogue and a small but attractive museum of Judaica.
We then visit the cemetery where his father is buried. On Sundays, my cousin walks to this cemetery to perform his regular mitzvah of reciting Hebrew prayers for the dead for visitors unable to do it themselves. But who will say the prayers for him when the time comes? Both of his children are married to Catholics, and most of Cracow’s Jews are not much younger than himself.
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Friday, June 1
We start at dawn for Rzeszow, the city where I was born, and Jaroslaw, where I spent my childhood. Along the way we pass hundreds of reasonably prosperous-looking small farms, but we are told that their appearance is deceptive. In addition to facing problems similar to those in industry, Poland’s farmers fear the disappearance of fixed prices for agricultural products.
The road signs recall names familiar from family legends—Przeworsk, Lancut, Sieniawa. We pass Mielec, where I had an uncle before the war, and Kolbuszowa, a small town where other relatives lived. I remember Kolbuszowa best because once in New York my father served as president of a Kolbuszowa lands-manshaft (which also still owns a cemetery plot in Queens) and we used to attend the Kolbuszower shul on the Lower East Side.
We stop in the tiny village of Radomysl Wielki (the “great”) from which my wife’s grandfather emigrated to America, the goldene medine, a century ago, and in Rzeszow I find a grimy building which I remember as having been a shiny modern house. I explain to an unfriendly shopkeeper that my grandfather once owned that house, and that I was born in a wooden annex which has since been razed. Several times we look for directions, but there are very few policemen because, as my driver, himself a former policeman, explains, the recent dismantling of the Communist secret police has resulted also in the demoralization of the regular police force. Thousands of patrolmen have resigned from the force, with the predictable consequence of a very steep rise in ordinary crime. Scores of people, in fact, have warned us against thieves, particularly pickpockets, in public places.
Close to Radomysl Wielki is the city of Tarnow. A small Jewish community existed there even after the war, but was driven away by a hostile population. Only a Jewish cemetery remains. The cemetery looks frightening. There are tall weeds of poison ivy, smashed and overturned tombstones with worms crawling on them, and broken bottles—remnants, no doubt, of drunken parties. Unfortunately, Tarnow’s abandoned and vandalized cemetery is typical of Jewish cemeteries of Poland. Those of Lodz and Cracow are exceptions.
While Rzeszow is now a major industrial center, Jaroslaw has not grown much. The marketplace is much as I remember it from before the war, except that not a single Jew remains in the town. Instead of Yiddish, I hear Romanian and Ukrainian. Unbelievable though it may seem, to Romanians and to Soviet citizens Poland is a prosperous country, and they come here to sell rugs and painted wooden dolls.
I have no difficulty finding the house where I once lived. One elderly woman even correctly identifies my old apartment, while another confides that the prewar Jewish landlord’s granddaughter visited the house some years ago to recover the family’s gold and precious stones that had been buried in the basement. Stories of surviving Jews coming to dig up hidden treasures are so common in Poland that they should qualify as a folklore motif.
As we are leaving Jaroslaw, I notice a wall covered with graffiti. One inscription reads Zydzi do gazu—“Jews to the gas chamber.” Next to it, however, someone has written, “Out with the racists.” My driver asks me to remember that since there are no Jews in Jaroslaw, both inscriptions are the work of Poles, presumably young ones. The problem of anti-Semitic graffiti is, apparently, quite pervasive. An article in Gazeta Wyborcza has reported that Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet who now resides in Berkeley, was shaken by such inscriptions on a recent visit.
The one Polish institution that could combat this resurgence of anti-Semitic moods is obviously the Catholic Church. It alone has the moral standing, it alone commands enough influence. Yet not only does the Church desist from any such activity, it occasionally contributes to fanning the flames of anti-Semitism.
Some months ago the émigréare freely available; Polish monthly Kultura reported that virulently anti-Semitic sermons were heard during the conflict over the convent at Auschwitz. And after a lecture I am to give at the Club of the Catholic Intelligentsia (KIK) in Warsaw, a young red-bearded Jew will rise to say that he personally attended a recent meeting in a local church at which the priest delivered a venomous attack on the “perfidious” Jews, referring to them by the highly insulting term gudlaje. The young man will give the date of the meeting, the name of the priest, and the exact location of the church. The audience at the club will remain silent. There will be no expressions of disapproval.
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Sunday, June 3
On our first day in Warsaw, a small item on the front page of Gazeta Wyborcza announces that the law abolishing censorship is going into effect that very day. Facetiously, the newspaper expresses its sympathies to bereaved censors. Actually, one would be hard-pressed to detect any evidence of censorship in the bookstores or kiosks except for a relative absence of erotica. Previously taboo works of anti-Communist èmigrès are freely available, and there is a proliferation of books on the crimes of the Stalin era.
The Warsaw Ghetto memorial is deserted, though a few faded flowers attest to recent visitors. We linger for half an hour, and meet three persons who together symbolize the status of Jews in Poland. One is a local old Yiddish-speaking Jew. The others are two young E1 Al stewardesses from a plane transporting Soviet Jews to Israel. (Poland’s government will soon reject Arab protests and reaffirm its policy of providing Soviet Jews with a transit point in Warsaw.)
In the evening, the Artistic Ensemble of the Polish Armed Forces gives a rousing performance in Warsaw’s largest theater. The program begins with the rendition of a medieval religious hymn. Predictably, martial and patriotic songs and dances predominate. To commemorate Polish soldiers who fought in the Allied armies during World War II, performers in British and French uniforms sing a medley of French songs and “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” The Russians receive no equal billing. In fact, they receive no billing at all.
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Tuesday, June 5
There are long lines at Warsaw’s Royal Castle, which was rebuilt after the war. An exhibition of some of the world’s best religious painting is a strong attraction, and there is a palpable sense of gratitude to Barbara Piasecka-Johnson, who has underwritten the costs. At the same time, there is disappointment and some bitterness. Barbara Piasecka’s is a modern Polish Cinderella story. Like thousands of her impoverished countrymen, she emigrated to America some years ago to seek her fortune. Unlike most, she did acquire a fortune by marrying an heir to the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceuticals firm. There were rumors for a time that she would use some of her multimillion-dollar legacy to bail out the shipyard of Gdansk. She did not, and the exhibit of religious art is apparently meant to serve as a consolation.
Today’s newspaper advertises a lecture on “What It Is Like to Be a Jew in Poland” at the Club of the Catholic Intelligentsia by Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943 and the only one to have remained in Poland. Arriving, I find the club packed, with people standing in the corridor. But Edelman never shows up. (He never calls, either, very likely because he could not reach Warsaw by phone, a common enough problem.) Since none of the four or five Jews in attendance agrees to substitute for him, I am asked to improvise on the subject of Poland and Polish Jews, as seen from America.
After my presentation, I am bombarded with questions from the audience that are really brief, and sometimes not very brief, speeches. Do I know that 80 percent of the Communist Polish secret police were Jews? (“Only two-thirds,” someone interjects.) Is it true that the Talmud sanctions the murder of Gentiles? What about dishonest Jews trying to hide behind Polish names? If the Arabs treated the Jews the way Israelis treat Palestinians, would not the Jews in America raise a hue and cry about anti-Semitism? Why do American Jews malign Poland?
I answer as best I can, and I conclude by saying that with only 4,000 Jews remaining here, as far as I am concerned Poland represents a closed chapter in Jewish history. Anti-Semitism in Poland is thus a purely Polish problem, like anti-Semitism in 17th-century Spain, when there were no Jews left in that country either.
Among all the participants in the discussion, only two are friendly. One woman apologizes for the inscription “Jews to the gas chamber,” which I saw in Jaroslaw: “I want you to remember that at least one Pole was ashamed of it.” And the other says she has been moved to tears by my command of Polish after more than four decades abroad.
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Wednesday, June 6
I had met Kazimierz and Maria Piechotka the previous summer when they were guests of the International Survey of Jewish Monuments which is run at my university by two art historians, Raina and Philipp Fehl. The Piechotkas are both retired architects from Warsaw whose book on the wooden synagogues of old Poland I have long admired. And it is the Piechotkas who have organized today’s excursion to what may be described as the Jewish ruins of northeastern Poland.
Our first stop is Tykocin, once a medium-sized commercial center and now the site of a large reconstructed synagogue. An eerie atmosphere pervades the spacious and mostly empty hall, made stranger still by the taped sound of cantorial chants. Remnants of old blessings and fragments of animal figures adorn the walls, and texts of Hebrew prayers and their Polish translations are found on the lecterns. Torah scrolls, crowns, breastplates, and pointers are enclosed in glass together with prayer shawls, phylacteries, and Hebrew Bibles. On the top floor of the museum we find a small room with a table set for the Sabbath, complete with candlesticks, challah coverings, and prayer books.
Encouraged in part by Tykocin’s example, Byelorussian farmers from the vicinity of Orla, a small town not far from Bialystok, are currently at work rebuilding a similarly imposing synagogue. A section of the edifice is to be used as a club for the villagers, but the sanctuary will be restored to look like the old photographs of Orla’s shul.
In Bialystok itself, there is no Jewish community, but the province’s department of antiquities is compiling a catalogue of all extant Jewish tombstones, complete with Polish translations of the Hebrew inscriptions. And the journal Bialystocczyzna (“The Bialystok Country”) occasionally prints articles dealing with the history of the region’s Jews. One in a recent issue on the now defunct Jewish community of Krynka is well researched and sympathetic in tone.
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Thursday, June 7
We have been told that the Jewish Historical Institute is located on Warsaw’s Tlomackie Street. Scores of local shopkeepers, passersby, and even a policeman directing traffic have never heard of Tlomackie Street, and little wonder. A back alley of three houses has been so named to commemorate a street in prewar Warsaw where Jewish cultural institutions were located. Active enough during the early postwar years, the Jewish Historical Institute is now a shadow of its old self. Its Polish-language journal appears irregularly, and its activities reflect inadequate staffing, poor funding, and, perhaps most importantly, the lack of an interested public. The truth is borne in upon me once again: in Poland the Jews now exist only as a fading memory, as exotic objects of curiosity, or as the pathological obsession of inveterate anti-Semites.
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Friday, June 8
I leave with mixed feelings. There is the satisfaction of seeing a longsuffering nation once again free to shape its own destiny after five decades of Nazi and Communist rule. There is also the confidence that the Poles will overcome the economic difficulties they now face. At the same time, I am depressed that hatred of the Jews persists in a country in which hardly any Jews survive. That is why I am heartened to read, on the eve of the 44th anniversary of the 1946 pogrom in Kielce, an open letter from Lech Walesa appealing to his compatriots to abandon the pretense that the dastardly event was merely a Soviet provocation for which the Poles cannot be held responsible. Provocation or not, Walesa writes, the crime was perpetrated on Polish soil and the murderers were Polish. Walesa proposes that a plaque be unveiled in Kielce to commemorate the tragedy and to serve as a warning to generations to come.
The timing of Walesa’s appeal has a special poignancy for me. I originally left Poland in the wake of the Kielce pogrom; it is gratifying to have returned for a visit just when repentance for this crime has been expressed by the man who (whatever his current relations with his ex-colleagues from Solidarity who are now running the country) has done more than any other to lead Poland back to freedom.
